“It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.”
The emperor reveals his disillusionment and pessimistic outlook on the future of humanity. In his opinion, his empire is too big to be governed effectively, thus giving way to destructive traits of its inhabitants. Destruction seems inevitable.
“There runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.”
Even though the emperor seems to have lost all hope for humanity, and is willing to accept its gloomy fate, Marco Polo tries to direct his attention to the positive things in between all miserable dwelling, i.e. the connections between people, which, however, go unnoticed.
“Every time I describe a city, I am saying something about Venice.”
Marco Polo presents this confession in the middle of his conversation with the emperor, therefore marking the center of structural symmetry. Polo wants to preserve his memory of his hometown by telling stories about other cities without explicitly mentioning Venice, as he fears that he will forget the city when he puts his memories in words.
"It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.”
Marco Polo emphasizes that everyone constructs their own story based on the input from the storyteller. Moreover, the statement means that he and the emperor will never be able to fully understand each other because their backgrounds, histories and personalities are too different.
"There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
Indeed, the emperor's outlook on the future of humankind is grim. Having listened to Marco Polo's descriptions of various cities, he concludes that the final destination is the infernal city. Polo, however, recognizes that humans have a choice and are therefore able to avert the downfall if they are willing to stop being passive.
